Among the most fundamental uses to which we put language is the portrayal of our own and others' stances and actions within a moral landscape. This dissertation explores the grammatical and discursive ramifications of this assertion by interrogating the central role language plays in mediating moral evaluation and negotiating a moral landscape. Specifically, concepts of moral personhood - or idealizations underlying conventions of evaluation and portrayal of the moral landscape - among Guatemala's Sakapultek Maya are examined in light of grammar and discourse. Although this dissertation draws from data representing a range of discourse genres, the particular focus is on the primary linguistic resources used in the native speech event of pixab', or ritual wedding advice.

The notion of stance - and utterance unit that lies between a specific grammatical resource and an idealized morally authoritative 'voice' that is argued to inhere in the genre of pixab' - is developed in order to probe the relationship between language and moral personhood. Specifically, pixab' is argued to be a primary cultural setting for deontic stance-taking, or how individuals position themselves with respect to notions of necessity, obligation and responsibility. Directives or verbs with a second person semantic agent are the most common deontic stance-taking resource in Sakapultek. The profusion of strategies for inflecting directives in Sakapultek are examined and analyzed in terms of the nature of the performance of a stance of moral authority that they facilitate. It is argued that in taking deontic stances, pixab' participants not only outline moral obligations, but that through their choice of directive form and framing, they position themselves with respect to two locally-relevant loci of moral authority, the relatively 'egocentric' and the relatively 'sociocentric.'